Heaven On Earth

Heaven On Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism by Joshua Muravchik, Encounter Books, 2002. 

Summary

This book presents a history of socialism organized into chapters for each major economic figure. My summary includes only those chapters that I found most interesting. 

Babeuf

Gracchus Babeuf was a radical egalitarian of the French Revolution. In addition to liberty and property of the Anglo-American enlightenment, the some leaders of the French revolution added a more radical form of equality than the equality under the law of the Anglo-American enlightenment, namely, an equality of property. The mainstream French revolutionaries still believed in private property, but the most radical revolutionary, Babeuf, opposed individually owned property. He thought all property should be owned in common. He wanted not just equality of material wealth, but also equality of knowledge, and even equality of intelligence. He saw inequality as being the fundamental cause of crime and war. In their ideal society, no one would have cause to envy anyone else. Money would be abolished. Family would be subordinate to the state. In 1828 the Italian Philippe Buonarotti wrote a book about Babeuf’s Society of Equals called Conspiration des égaux.

Robert Owen

Welshman Robert Owen was a pre-Marx socialist who had some unusual beliefs: (a) people do not have free will and should not be held accountable for their actions, (b) religion is bad because it supports the idea that people have free will, (c) a person’s character is the product of society, (d) property should be owned communally, rather than by individuals, and (e) barter is better than money. He established two utopian communities based upon shared property: New Harmony in Indiana in the United States in 1825, and Queenswood in Hampshire in England in 1839. They both failed. When Owen saw that his ideas did not work in practice, he blamed the participants, not his ideas. These two communities, and all nineteenth century secular utopian communities, failed to become financially self-supporting after their founders’ investments were exhausted. The secular utopian communities failed because of the lack of greater rewards for those who contributed more to the community. When these utopian communities failed, the socialist utopians changed tactics by attempting to gain political power so that society as a whole could be changed. Robert Owen neglected his wife and daughter to pursue his career. In his later years, Robert Owen embraced spiritualism, communicating with the dead through a medium.

Eduard Bernstein

Unlike most Marxist intellectuals, Eduard Bernstein grew up poor. Eduard Bernstein became a protege of Friedrich Engels, and Engels chose Eduard Bernstein as executor of Engels’ literary estate. The daughter of Karl Marx, Tussy Marx, was a rival of Eduard Bernstein. Karl Marx did more than describe an ideal society. Marx claimed that Marxism was a science of history that could predict the future. Hegel was the source of Marx’s historical determinism. Marx predicted that the conditions of the factory workers would get worse, prompting an overthrow of capitalism. In 1899 Eduard Bernstein published a book called Evolutionary Socialism. In this work, Bernstein pointed out that the quality of life of the working class had improved substantially since the Communist Manifesto had been published fifty years before. Marx had been proven wrong in his prediction. Either capitalism worked, or it had been made to work by the amelioration of its harsher aspects, by the moderate socialist reformers working within the system. Lenin was quite angry with Eduard Bernstein, because there was now no moral justification for a violent seizure of power by the Communists. 

The Fabian Society

The Fabian Society was founded 1883, originally under the name of the Fellowship of the New Life. Under traditional Christian religion, the goal was for each individual to reform himself, but the Fabians preferred instead to reform society. The Fabians followed the ideas of Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill and Robert Owen. Prominent members included George Bernard Shaw (playwright), H.G. Wells (novelist), Annie Besant (theosophist), Bertrand Russell (logician), Sidney Webb and his wife Beatrice Webb (social reformers). The Fabian Society played a prominent role in the formation of the British Labour Party. Sidney and Beatrice Webb founded the London School of Economics. Sidney and Beatrice Webb wrote a favorable book about the Soviet Union